John J. Prendergast, "Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality" (Sounds True, 2025)

A guide to connecting with your deepest ground―a rootedness that supports authentic psychological healing and embodied spirituality
“This beautiful and deeply insightful work invites us to reconnect with our true ground―a place of inner stability and peace that lies beyond fear.” ―Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance
In John J. Prendergast’s decades of experience as a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, the area of the body that’s most difficult for people to connect with, given our survival fear and trauma, is our physical and energetic ground. This area in the lower belly and at the base of the spine corresponds with the root chakra in the Indian subtle body tradition, the lower dan tien in Taoism, and the hara in Japanese martial arts. While most spiritual traditions focus on opening the mind and the heart, they tend to avoid or undervalue the opening of the ground. Prendergast notes, “It remains largely unconscious and deeply defended.”
This guide invites you to take a deep dive into your personal, archetypal, and universal ground, and to see through the false ground of your early conditioning and limited identity. Throughout Your Deepest Ground, Prendergast shares:
• Profound yet accessible teachings to help you connect with your ground
• Sensitive awareness to the trauma we’re often holding in this part of our physical and energetic body
• Sensing and inquiry practices to work with your own body and life
• Authentic anecdotes and conversations drawn from his teaching that show the power of this work in action
By consciously opening to our ground, we can experience a felt sense of inner safety and stability that supports the full flowering of inner peace, freedom, and loving awareness―a truly embodied spirituality.

John Prendergast PhD is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, a nondual teacher, author, retired psychotherapist. He is also a retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he taught masters level counseling students for twenty-three years.

He studied for many years with the European sage Dr. Jean Klein, as well as with Adyashanti, a well-known spiritual teacher. He was invited to share the dharma by Dorothy Hunt in 2011 and received dharma transmission (authorization to teach) from Adyashanti in 2023.

John has been offering residential retreats with his wife, Christiane, since 2015, in both the U.S. and, more recently, in Europe. He also has extensive experience teaching online. For more about his books and other offerings, please visit his website https://www.listeningfromsilence.com/

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